Mac Pro 5,1 and OpenCore

pjgolian
pjgolian
edited November 2020 in SecuritySpy
I decided today to upgrade my Mac Pro 5,1 to Catalina (using Dosdude1 patched installer). Afterwards, I installed OpenCore to enable a boot screen for my unpatched AMD Radeon RX 850 metal card. One of the features of OpenCore is enabling AMD H264 / HEVC hardware decode + encode in Mojave or later. I don't recall SecuritySpy's exact CPU usage prior to OpenCore, but I think with all 13 cameras being viewed, usage was probably around 40-50%. After installing OpenCore, SecuritySpy CPU usage is hovering around 1.5%. That's quite a big boost in performance. Right now, I'm just viewing the cameras on the Mac Pro since recording is done via my Mac Mini. I'm curious, if I move my license copy of SS back to my Mac Pro, would SS benefit from this performance boost when recording video.

Comments

  • Ben
    Ben
    This is impressive - sounds like you are getting great performance with this setup. Decompression is the main processor-intensive task that SecuritySpy has to do, so if you've already achieved the viewing of 13 cameras at a very low CPU usage, you have already solved this problem. Assuming that you are recording the camera streams as-is (i.e. you have the "Recompress video data" option turned OFF under Preferences > Cameras > Device), adding recording won't significantly increase CPU usage beyond what you are currently seeing.
  • Grey
    Grey

    Have you implemented this procedure for enabling AMD H264 / HEVC hardware decode + encode (on the RX580) in later versions of macOS — more specifically Ventura? I have a 2010 12-core with NVIDIA GT630 / 2, and it won't decode video streams from my low-end Amcrest PoE cameras in Ventura 13.2. The identical setup (cameras / hardware) and the same version of SecuritySpy (5.5.4) work like a charm in Big Sur (on a separate PCIe bootable SSD). I skipped over Monterey on this machine; Ventura is also on its own PCIe drive (both SSDs are Samsung 970).

  • Grey
    Grey

    Also...I ordered a RX580 / 4 flashed card from macvidcards.com yesterday. A worthy upgrade at a very decent price, even if it doesn't put me on the road to solving this particular problem.

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